PRO176

PRO176 (Ruby Dougbe) was born in Paris in 1976 and grew up in Choisy-le-Roi, in the southern suburbs. He began drawing at five, copying the superhero pages of Jack Kirby, and came to graffiti in 1989 after seeing it at a hip-hop festival. He joined the Grim Team in 1996 and the following year co-founded Ultra Boys International, the crew he is still associated with. For a decade he worked as a rapper under the name Profecy, releasing an album in 2003, before setting music aside in 2009 to paint full time — a decision he has connected to meeting the New York writer SEEN that year.

The paintings are dense, faceted and mechanical. Kirby's influence never left: figures and letters are constructed from interlocking planes, hard-edged and metallic, lit as though by a light source outside the canvas. Onto that he layers a cubist treatment of the face and figure — features displaced, viewpoints multiplied — and a lettering practice that has been broken down into components and reassembled as abstract structure. The result reads simultaneously as comic-book panel, cubist portrait and wildstyle piece, which is not a combination that has many other practitioners.

Colour is applied in flat, saturated fields with sharp transitions, and the compositions are built to be read at a distance before they resolve into parts. The vocabulary is closer to industrial design than to painterly gesture; nothing is left loose. That precision is deliberate, and it is what separates his work from the expressive tendency in most post-graffiti painting.

The decade spent in rap is not incidental to the painting. He came up in a French hip-hop culture in which writing, rapping and drawing were parts of one activity rather than separate careers, and the move from one to another in 2009 reads less as a change of direction than as a narrowing of focus. The lettering that survives in the canvases carries that history: it is built to be read as a name first, whatever else the composition is doing.

He published his first monograph, Cosmonometry, in 2014. He has exhibited across Europe, frequently alongside artists of the first New York generation — with CRASH in Saarbrücken in 2016 and again in Dortmund in 2018, and with SEEN, JonOne and Tilt in Marseille in 2017.

SELECTED CV

Born 1976, Paris, France

Lives and works in Paris, France

Education and Training

Self-taught

Selected Group Exhibitions

2016 Pigments Vertigo: Daze, Crash, Pro176, Galerie Cox, Bordeaux, France

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

Wynwood Walls, Miami, FL, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

1997 Co-founder, Ultra Boys International

1996 Member, Grim Team

2010 Member, Return to Zero (RTZ), Berlin, Germany

Selected Publications and Monographs

2014 Cosmonometry, first monograph